I've reached the 50,000-word milestone with the fourth Paul Robertson novel and feel it's now time to plan out just what is the next step on the road to Paul's final destination.
Actually, that’s a little white lie—a small exaggeration, if you will. I have a spreadsheet where I keep a track of the word counts of each chapter of my novels and short stories and it’s showing the fourth Paul Robertson book as being 49,806 words long across ten chapters. I have the heading of chapter eleven typed out in my manuscript and once I start typing out the opening I have already written in my head, it’ll go past 50,000 quite quickly.
But that’s not the point.
The point is, I’ve now written what I had planned as the “opening” to the novel and need to work out how to get to the endpoint and if that endpoint is indeed the end of Paul’s story (which I hope it is) or if it’s a stopping off point for a fifth book. That’s something I won’t really know until get there. I posted last year about book lengths and how one that I was reading was, in my opinion, far too long and actually more like two or even three books, not one, so the last thing I want to do is then put out something that’s too long. I’m thinking no more than 150,000 words, so by the time I get to 100,000 I should be able to judge if I can finish Paul’s story in another 50,000 words or if I’ll need a fifth book.
I will admit that I’ve never really been a “planner”. I tend to write linearly from the start of the story to the end. That’s just how my brain works. So I’ve never really had any kind of detailed “plan” or “roadmap” for how a story goes. At least, not one that’s written down. On the one occasion that I did try and do that, the plan went out of the window pretty quickly and the route the story ended up taking was nothing like the original roadmap.
I do tend to have a clear endpoint in mind for a story. And a rough idea of how to get there. But my characters sort of ‘live in my head’ and have their own ideas about how their story pans out.
So, where am I and where do I need to get to?
The ten chapters I’ve written so far cover a two week period in Paul’s life, a number of significant events and one significant new character. Relationships—both business and personal—have evolved a little, moving Paul a bit closer to where he will ultimately end up.
The next step is to continue to develop those business and personal relationships. There are a couple of “events” that I know need to happen, although I haven’t really plotted out at what point in the timeline they happen or how I get there. So I guess, for the first time in a long time, I’m asking myself if I do need to sketch out some sort of roadmap—even if ultimately I don’t stick to it. I suppose it’s a bit like planning a road trip. I know the towns I want to go through on my way to my final destination, but I’m not really interested in planning the route road-by-road so much as making sure I head in the right general direction.
Or, I could just keep writing and see where the characters take me. Which will probably take me longer, throw up a couple of roadblocks that I have to navigate around but will, for me, be more satisfying because that’s just how my brian works.
If I’m honest with myself, it’ll probably be a bit of both.
